Intergenerational effects of education on child mortality: Evidence from the compulsory primary schooling law in Vietnam

• We investigate the effects of parental education on child mortality caused by a primary mandatory schooling law. • Maternal education has a negative impact on child mortality, even after controlling for father’s education. • The effect of paternal education is sensitive to the inclusion of the instrumented mother’s education in the model. • The reduction in child mortality is mainly driven by the increase in the education of disadvantaged groups. • Mechanisms include increases in marriage age, age at first birth, and paid work and reduction in total fertility. We leverage the introduction of Vietnam’s primary compulsory schooling law as a natural experiment to provide new evidence on the effects of parents’ education on child mortality. Employing data from the 2009 Vietnam Population and Housing Census and a regression discontinuity design, we show that the reform increased average schooling duration by approximately half a year. Our key findings reveal that one additional year of maternal schooling induced by the law reduced child mortality by 29.4%, with the majority of improvements concentrated among women residing in rural areas, minor ethnicities, and female children. While increased paternal education also exhibited a negative impact on child mortality, the effect diminished in magnitude and became statistically insignificant when controlling for maternal education. This suggests that neglecting to account for spousal education does not introduce substantial biases in estimates of maternal education’s effect on child mortality but may lead to an upward bias in estimates for fathers’ education. Further, our results indicate that increased maternal education was associated with increasing age at marriage and first birth, reducing total fertility, and engaging more in paid work, all of which could serve as potential pathways for child mortality reduction.